regex to find a string, excluding comments

Question

I need a regex to search for the string SQLHELPER that ignores commented code (single line comment or multi line comments). I am searching in visual studio.

Answer 1

You may use

(?<!^[\p{Zs}\t]*//.*)(?<!/\*(?:(?!\*/)[\s\S\r])*?)\bSQLHELPER\b

See the regex demo.

Details

• (?<!^[\p{Zs}\t]*//.*) - a negative lookbehind that fails the match if, immediately to the left of the current location, the following pattern does not match:
  • ^ - start of line
  • [\p{Zs}\t]* - any 0+ horizontal whitespaces
  • // - a // substring
  • .* - any 0+ chars other than line break chars
• (?<!/\*(?:(?!\*/)[\s\S\r])*?) - - a negative lookbehind that fails the match if, immediately to the left of the current location, the following pattern does not match:
  • /\* - a /* substring
  • (?:(?!\*/)[\s\S\r])*? - (tempered greedy token) any char (matched with [\s\S\r]), 0 or more repetitions but as few as possible (due to *?) that does not start a */ substring (due to the (?!\*/) negative lookahead)
• \bSQLHELPER\b - a whole word SQLHelper (\b are word boundaries).